Pyalla Technologies … NonStop: heading for markets, unknown?

Enough with changes! The updates provided for the past couple of months have all started with references to changes. I think we all get it; indeed it’s inescapable that we are all living in a time when change is constant so there really isn’t much to add this month. However, it is fair to say that it has been a month spent with NonStop users and vendors as well as with the HPE NonStop team. For the fourth time, your NonStop product management and development leadership invited NonStop partners to a one-day symposium where, under strict enforcement of confidentiality agreements all participants signed, updates on the complete NonStop portfolio were provided.

While we cannot get into the specifics for the reasons provided above, what we can say is that your NonStop team is committed to keeping the key stakeholders that is, the partners, current with all research and development programs being actively pursued. Even as I began with enough with changes the biggest take-away every partner acknowledged was that NonStop role within the growing HPE product portfolio remains a priority and that there is no lessening of interest by HPE when it comes to supporting projects to help grow the NonStop community. Yes, growth is happening and you may not be witnessing growth in your city, but it is happening. And the user community demographics continue to be transformed thanks to a growing base of users in Asia-Pac region as well as in the traditional strongholds of Europe and North America. Yes, in echoing remarks made in public forums by HPE executives (at Edinburgh by Neil Davies and at the most recent ATUG at Atlanta event by Jeff Kyle), beginning with 2018 the sales teams have been meeting all their objectives when it comes to sales of NonStop and this includes sales of new systems to new customers.

If you missed reading updates that were written following ATUG Atlanta and the NonStop Partner Symposium, you may want to check out the following two posts just published to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View –

Following ATUG
By HPE’s account, we at NonStop, create data!
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2019/09/by-hpes-account-we-at-nonstop-create.html

Following NonStop Partner Symposium
All that was revealed at NonStop Partner Symposium!
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2019/09/all-that-was-revealed-at-nonstop.html

As with many of you that I have talked to this year, there is an expectation growing across the community that the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) to be held in Burlingame, California, (November 3 – 6, 2019) will reveal even more about the growth taking place when it comes to the sales of NonStop. Whenever the conversation turns to demographics then in the old days NonStop was the premier platform for financial institutions and telcos worldwide, which was driven entirely by the products on offer from our NonStop solutions vendors. However, there are as many NonStop systems going to markets not well-known to the NonStop community as there are NonStop systems shipping to familiar names from yes, those old days! If you haven’t talked with your NonStop sales team in quite a while it may prove invaluable to your potential experience at the TBC should you do so. While I cannot give anything away I can tell you that from Margo and my recent trips to Europe in 2019 there are a couple of surprises lurking behind the numbers.

Virtualized NonStop (vNS) – if you have as yet not paid too much attention then perhaps it’s about time you take a look at vNS. For many analysts looking at HPE and its Mission Critical Systems portfolio, the move to support virtual machines is as exciting a prospect as has come from HPE in many years. Data Centers are increasingly becoming virtualized and whole markets are committed to virtualization. It is inevitable that vNS takes hold and it is my prediction that in three years’ time – that is by the end of 2022 – there will be as many vNS deployed across the enterprise as there are traditional NonStop systems today. Surprised? It may interest the NonStop community that as enterprises become familiar with vNS and understand the best way to leverage vNS (and it will likely be for running different indeed, non-traditional applications) then it will find a growing base of followers. And quickly! The announcements in support of VMware together with the potential for providing a complete “stack” suggest that there will be a vNS to meet every enterprise need whenever the mandate calls for 24 x 7 x forever operations.

One possible usage of vNS that has my attention is the prospect of not just creating virtualized instances of the NS stack and of the CLIMs for both storage and comms, but how about including a type of Application CLIM. Into the virtual machines you define, add one that runs Linux (or Windows) while at it as the path-length between the vNS stack and your Linux stack will be the same as it will be between vNS and vCLIMs. Why would you do this? So many applications are optimized for Linux that simply plugging them into NonStop – think JSON and think REST – opens the door to greater awareness within any enterprise of the power and strength of today’s NonStop SQL. In some respects, the question becomes why move the data in part or in whole when you can so easily plug in the application?

One final observation, in case you missed it from the above suggestion: data. For many members of the NonStop community it has always been about transaction processing but NonStop creates the data! As we learn more about the hardware roadmaps, what happens when memory is unlimited and comes for free? Why leave NonStop? There is much more to be said here but I will defer to the upcoming TBC event before adding anything further and I trust you are already making plans to attend.  Finally, I see some of you have taken to heart my request for “liking and following me” on LinkedIn and twitter as I am already seeing the numbers growing – so many thanks for all your support.

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC